Outside It Is Still Noisy, Inside Me It Is Finally Quiet

Late afternoon in the room, light coming through the gap in the door and settling on the edge of a wooden desk gone pale with age. I was sitting alone with a glass of water on the table, warm enough that I could not be bothered to get up and change it. Out on the balcony the cicadas were still screaming as if summer never got tired. No music, no phone, just sitting there listening to the even turn of the fan and someone's sandals in the corridor. Everything out there was still loud, and inside me it was quieter than it had been in a long time.

Sometimes I think stillness is the reward for anyone patient enough to get all the way through a long day. The older I get, the less it feels like a gift and the more it feels like a rest stop after an exhausting stretch of road. As if only when you are completely out of breath do you sit down and let the noise out there run past you like water through your fingers.

Stillness is not always pleasant. Some evenings I get home late, touch the light switch and cannot bring myself to press it. The room dark, wind through the gap in the door lifting the curtain. Nobody calls, nobody messages. And in my head there is nothing left but a wide open space. In those moments I do not have to smile, do not have to look fine, do not have to hurry anywhere. Every time, I see it clearly: real quiet is not outside. It is when you stop grabbing at noise to fill the gaps in yourself.

Some days I am afraid of that quiet. Afraid that nobody remembers me, that I no longer have a part in anyone else's story. But the more of those days I go through, the more the quiet feels like an old friend who asks for nothing, does not push me to be better, and simply sits there watching me breathe through the tiredness.

I once lived in Vancouver, a long cold, snow turning the world outside the window white. A small house, meals I cooked myself, nobody waiting for me to come home. In those days stillness was not a choice, it was a companion, even when I wanted it to disappear. I learned to hear the clatter of my own washing up, the water moving through the pipes, the complete absence of another person's voice in a room. So quiet that sometimes I had to put an old radio programme on just to be less afraid.

Once I tried using silence to calm an argument. I thought if I said nothing it would settle by itself, like foam on a cooling coffee. Then I understood: silence has never been a solution for two people. It is only enough to save you from a small storm of your own. Stillness is sometimes just stopping, the feeling of not wanting to fight anyone any more, including yourself.

Whenever I find myself past my limit, sick of the noise, I give myself an afternoon of doing nothing. No reading, no replying, no explaining why I am quiet. Just sitting there listening to the fan turn and the wind at the door, until it is obvious: real peace is sometimes only being at peace inside, whatever is happening out there.